Sunday Argument #12: The Misanthropic Principle

There is a widely-abused principle that gets bandied about occasionally in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of science called the anthropic principle. The principle itself is nothing more than the borderline tautology that we should be unsurprised that, given our existence, the universe we inhabit is compatible with our existence. (Stronger forms of the principle, holding for example that the universe must be configured such that it could contain observers, are pure fantasy in my opinion.) The principle has been abused in the sense that it has been ventured as some kind of rebuttal to the "fine-tuning" argument for God's existence, which tries to infers God's existence from the configuration of the various fundamental constants of the universe, but the principle is useless for that purpose. The design argument does not say that our existence is surprising given the configuration of the universe, it says that the configuration of the universe itself is surprising.

I'd like to front a similar principle narrowly tailored to do a better job in repulsing the claims of the design argument. Elsewhere, I've argued that the design argument isn't an argument at all since the explanation it offers (God's existence) doesn't seem to make the existence of the universe at all, much less its configuration, any more likely. Admittedly this turns on a lot of assumptions about God's own character that, while I think are generally indisputable based on the various predicates of God's existence (his perfection, his eternality, etc.), might make that kind of analysis a little bit weaker. So, I'll offer something a little bit simpler.

The anthropic principle is, like I said, very nearly a tautology, an irrefutably and therefore rather boring. It holds merely that:

• If we exist, it isn't surprising that we exist somewhere that's compatible with our existence.

Boring, right? That's the anthropic principle. But to slightly narrow its edge against the design argument, I'd like to offer what I think is a similarly self-substantiating principle that I'd like to call the Misanthropic Principle:

• If our flourishing is the central concern of existence, we should be surprised to find obstacles to our flourishing.

The misanthropic principle is I just think as self-evident as the anthropic one. The only versions of theism that really matter are ones that hold something like the antecedent clause of the misanthropic principle, that existence is somehow about humanity, that the cosmos is a story in which humanity is at least one of the main players. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism definitely assert this, Hinduism at least has most of the major morally-salient action taking place in human lives, and even non-religious supernaturalisms attribute some kind of supremacy to human flourishing, like Tipler's "observer-dependent universe" baloney. In short, I want to oppose, in as few words as possible, the notion that the "fine-tuning" of our universe is for us.

It should be obvious that I am trying to mold a version of the problem of evil here, and that is quite correct: I think that obstacles to our flourishing are genuine obstacles to theism. Theism writ large is of course committed mainly to the claim that God exists, but just like atheism, theism is hardly just the claim that there is a God. It is just as essential to theism that God created the universe that he created it with us in mind as its central concern. The cosmology of the Bible just is the cosmology of humanity: it is focused on our creation, our souls, and our ultimate annihilation. God acts in history, on these traditions, only viz-a-viz his relationship with humanity.

Those same versions of theism stipulate that God loves us and that our flourishing is his main goal, whether that comes by the various rewards he offers us in this life or the promises he uses to compel our moral actions with the afterlife in mind. The misanthropic principle is little more than a starting point; it is the root concession I ask of theism that things that are bad for us militate against theism insofar as they require an explanation; given the promises we are made that there is a God who loves us, plans for our success, and operates with our ultimate well-being in mind, we should at least be surprised, we should be entitled to an explanation, when we encounter obstacles thereto.

I also refer to the principle as the misanthropic principle because, if God were a complete misanthrope, that would seriously de-fang any surprise we might want to express at apparent evils in the world. I think that, given the combined facts of the misanthropic principle and those of apparent evil, a misanthropic God is a better explanation for the universe than theism but still a worse explanation than atheism. Theism defends two enormous grounds, that God exists and that God loves us despite all appearances to the contrary, misanthropic theism (lets call it) defends only one enormous ground, that God exists (it need not explain evil because the existence of a misanthropic God explains it just fine), and atheism defends zero enormous grounds, only the universally indisputable claim that the evidence shows what the evidence shows and nothing else in particular.